What we've been working on lately.

I started saving design studios and designers' personal websites to Raindrop in 2020. The rule has always been quality over quantity: I only keep the ones worth stopping for and taking in slowly, with fresh ideas in the work, case studies that show the thinking and not just the polish, and websites made with the same care as the work itself. Six years later that collection holds about a thousand studios, and a second one holds more than two hundred independent designers. Today it becomes Longlist, a public index of 1,250 studios and designers across 64 countries.

A year ago we launched Mise, our internal project management platform, and told you how much our team loved it. Since then, one question kept coming up: "Can we use it too?" Starting today, the answer is yes. Mise is open for public access, and you can see for yourself.

Moodr started as a joke, a moodboard that worked like Tinder, put together in a few days with v0 and Cursor. It was fun to use, but the more references we gathered for our own projects, the clearer it became that the tool we actually wanted was a different one. So we rebuilt Moodr from the ground up, into a real tool for the way designers collect and shape inspiration.

Liang Huan is a music producer, educator, and the founder of HEM, an independent music label. What followed a chaotic thirty-minute cold open was a long, unhurried conversation across twelve time zones about music, games, novels, and the question of why someone would pour twenty hours a day into something he believes in when it isn't even the thing he loves most.

Reading on the web has gotten unreasonable in a quiet way, with articles that run longer than they need to, a healthy share of what's worth reading sitting in a language you don't fully read, and the genuinely useful tab always buried somewhere deeper in the stack than you have patience to dig for. You tell yourself you'll come back to it later, and most of the time that later never quite arrives.

For the first properly recorded episode of Dine Podcast, I sat down with Tianlu Xue, co-founder and CEO of Second Enlightenment. Fifteen years ago Tianlu was the first intern I ever hired, at Zhihu. He later spent four years running product at early Xiaohongshu, then five at ByteDance. He left ByteDance last year to start his own company. His newest product, Clawly, is a cloud-based OpenClaw client built for users who have never set up a local environment. For most of our hour together, though, we were not actually talking about the product. We were talking about a question Tianlu has been turning over for months: how far ahead the frontier of AI has moved, and how little of that the ordinary user has noticed.

Two weeks after mynd shipped, I sat down with cbvivi (Wang Xiaoguang) to record an episode about his new app, mynd. In his own words, it is "a chat-style front end for writing Markdown files." cbvivi was one of China's earliest vloggers, and a veteran podcast host. Further back, he was an editor at a magazine, and ran a long-running iPhone homescreen observation column on his personal blog. mynd is not the product of a developer who decided to make an app. It is what happens when someone who has spent most of his life watching how other people use software finally decides to build one himself.